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No. 1 issue is economy, not Bush

I’m quite sure that in the true-believer Democrat bubble, hatred of President Bush is a huge motivator. But those people are not the average voter.

No, those are people who honestly view Dick Cheney or Karl Rove as only slightly less evil than the devil incarnate; puppet masters who have pulled Bush’s strings to ruin a great nation.

They are the equivalent of the Republican true-believers who, in the run-up to Y2K, persisted in spreading e-mails IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS insisting that Bill Clinton was imminently going to impose martial law. FROM WHICH WE WILL NEVER ESCAPE.

Please. There has been one issue on voters minds recently – the same as James Carville’s quip in 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Pew Research recently found 87 percent of people saying the economy “will be very important to their vote.”

Rasmussen Reports compared the polls of 2008 and 2004 and found that the big issues have been swapped.

In 2004, 41 percent of those polled ranked national security as No. 1 and only 26 percent said the economy was. This time, 43 percent ranked the economy the top issue and only 26 percent said national security.

The most telling results came from a Roper Center poll, which asked: “What do you think is the most important problem facing the country today?”

As recently as August, only 32 percent of respondents said the economy. In October, it was 55 percent.

What a difference a month and a burst bubble makes. A Gallup Poll had McCain leading 47 percent to 45 percent in mid-September. Mid-October had Obama leading 51-42.

In swing state Ohio, John Green of the University of Akron’s National Survey of Religion and Politics confirmed in its recent poll that “80 percent of Ohioans picked the economy as the single-most-important issue.”

They also saw the same lead shift to Obama. What Green did not find was anti-Bush sentiment. “We interviewed 1,200 people, and no one offered antipathy toward Bush.”

Green emphasized voters’ opinions on social issues have not changed, just their priorities. Too bad, since Democrats’ views on “redistribution of wealth” will hurt the economy further.

As McCain put it a year ago, “Tough times can breed fear . . . and the Democrats are using those fears to push an agenda that is tired, dangerous and will rob us of economic freedom.”

Citizen Online Archive, 2006-2009

This archive contains all the stories that appeared on the Tucson Citizen's website from mid-2006 to June 1, 2009.

In 2010, a power surge fried a server that contained all of videos linked to dozens of stories in this archive. Also, a server that contained all of the databases for dozens of stories was accidentally erased, so all of those links are broken as well. However, all of the text and photos that accompanied some stories have been preserved.

For all of the stories that were archived by the Tucson Citizen newspaper's library in a digital archive between 1993 and 2009, go to Morgue Part 2

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